“Skinner liked touting the psychedelic aspects of opiate use,” said Halpern.
Only later did he learn he was being overdosed on fentanyl. When Bauer convulsed and began to fade, Skinner brought him back with Naloxone, the generic version of Narcan. Unlike Hulebak, Bauer revived.
“Mike learned his lesson, though,” insisted Savinelli. “He never trusted the son of a bitch again.”
Others were neither so lucky nor so chastened. Bauer’s resuscitation only encouraged Skinner. Elmer Gantry paled beside him. In white lab coat with stethoscope looped round his neck, Skinner proudly put the “con” back into conversion. He presented himself as the psychotropic Kildare.
“More like Mengele,” muttered Halpern.
Pickard liked the ladies as much as Skinner, though it might be argued that he was slightly more selective. Leonard counted among his scientific role models Kary Mullis and Richard Feynman—both shameless voyeurs when they weren’t pursuing Nobel prizes.
“I loved his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman,”5 said Pickard.
In a chapter titled, “Topless Bars and Other Ways to Have Fun,” the Nobel laureate recalled leering as a nearby couple’s foot massage advanced toward casual sex one afternoon during the 1980s. Feynman lounged beside them in the spa at Esalen:
He starts to rub her big toe. “I think I feel it,” he says. “I feel a kind of dent—is that the pituitary?”
I blurt out, “You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!”
They looked at me, horrified . . . and said, “It’s reflexology!”
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
Pickard smiled at the passage. Most men were dogs, truth be told. Feynman the physicist and Pickard the chemist needed pleasuring as much as the next guy. And from Leonard’s point of view, there was no aphrodisiac quite so affecting as the illusion of sexual control.
Halpern recalled him once telling Harlow, “You know honey, we should hire surrogates around the world, and they can carry your egg and my sperm and we can have little Leonards and Debbies all over!”
Pickard allegedly told Skinner that he wanted to have many children by many different women.
One of his favored San Francisco haunts was the notorious Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre,6 where he met Martina Schenevar (stage name Selin), Deanna Luce (Marisa), Athena Raphael, and Sita Kaylin (Natasha). Their pet name for Leonard was “Fancy Pants.” He wined and dined them during their off hours. Martina once accompanied him on an expedition to Bangkok.
According to Skinner, Pickard checked into the five-star Auberge du Soleil in Napa Valley one April weekend for a ménage with Luce and Schenavar. The lovefest ended in a pitched battle. Hotel management had to kick all of them out.
“Skinner has a rich fantasy life, dwelling inside his own hallucinations,” said Leonard.
Whenever he stayed in Santa Fe, Pickard unwound at gallery openings and at a favorite topless lounge in Albuquerque. He gravitated to one dancer/artist in particular.
An environmental trainee employed by the air quality department of the state of New Mexico, Trais Kliphuis (pronounced Trace Clip-house) had recently staged a one-woman show in Santa Fe she called “Flesh Off the Easel.” Leonard had struck up conversations with half-naked women before, but this one was different.
“I’m not a very literal person,” she said. “I’m more interested in the sublime and the mysterious, and in seeing what comes through me rather than having a concept or an image.”
Thirty-something, intriguingly multifaceted yet fiercely independent, Trais clearly was no bimbo. By the time he wooed Kliphuis, Leonard and Deb were already on the rocks. Motherhood suited her, but abandonment did not. They hadn’t exactly split, but Leonard’s lysergic wanderings had taken their toll.
“Deborah liked to snoop though my notes, clothes, car, everywhere, even while I bathed,” complained Pickard.
Trais, on the other hand, had as free a spirit as Leonard’s. During their on-again, off-again year together, Leonard proposed marriage more than once. Tapping into Skinner’s wealth, he plied her with gifts and offered to retire the $135,000 mortgage on her new house in Santa Fe. They flew twice to Amsterdam and London on his dime, as well as the resort island of St. Maarten in the Dutch West Indies. Later, when she was asked to identify him from the witness stand, Trais pointed at Leonard and sighed, “He’s that beautiful man over there.”
Trais was no Blanche Dubois. She grew up on Long Island, studied chemical engineering at Tufts, and worked variously as cancer researcher, physicist’s assistant, and senior WIPP7 technician, while frequently opting for art over science.
“I always enjoyed her stories of dropping thousands of feet below the surface of the New Mexico desert into the vast salt mine storage facility for nuclear waste from Los Alamos,” said Pickard. “Railroad tracks like a honeycomb, geologic eons passing on the way down: ancient oceans from 250 million years ago.”
Trais might support herself as a scientist, but she made her name as an artist.
“Paint inspires me,” she told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “I just love playing with it and seeing what comes through that I’ve never done before. . . .”
Her reluctance to answer Leonard’s marriage proposals might be traced to similar pleas that she got from Todd Skinner, who promised diamonds, sapphires, and a visit to Bora Bora aboard his G5 jet. That he had no jet or any hope of showering her with gems eventually became apparent, but would not have persuaded her in any event. Trais was an artist first, paramour second.
Leonard didn’t wait for her to change her mind. Call it mid-life crisis or momentary self-awareness, but at fifty-four, Pickard was suddenly in the market for a wife. He fell next for a Ukrainian premed student whom he’d first encountered in St. Petersburg.
Natasha Kruglova was six years younger than Trais and ten years younger than Deborah Harlow. As Leonard grew older, his taste in women clearly trended younger. He began dating an emigre
